A Very Short History of Western Thought

Overview

A masterly distillation of two-and-a-half millennia of intellectual history, and a readable and entertaining crash course in Western philosophyShort, sharp, and entertaining, this survey covers the development of all aspects of the Western philosophical tradition from the ancient Greeks to the present day. No major representative of any significant strand of Western thought escapes the author's attention: the Christian Scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages, the great philosophers of the Enlightenment, the German idealists from Kant to Hegel; the utilitarians Bentham and Mill; the transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau; Kierkegaard and the existentialists; the analytic philosophers Russell, Moore, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein; and—last but not least—the four shapers-in-chief of our modern world: Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein.

Author Biography

Stephen Trombley is a writer, editor, Emmy Award–winning filmmaker, and president of the independent film and television production company Worldview Pictures. He was editor of the highly acclaimed The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought.